Originally posted by AlexM All these photos have been taken with 5 bracketed shots and then processed with Photomatix Pro in its default mode.
Ok, I looked up Photomatix. It has two modes:
- Exposure Blending
- HDR/Tone Mapping
The second is the one I meant. You probably used the first which is equivalent to heavy PSing...
The second gives artificial results as well and it is difficult to find a suitable tone mapping to avoid it, esp. as you can't see the image w/o tone mapping applied. More investigation: There seem to be two modes for tone mapping: "details enhancer" and "tone compressor". The former has a slider "micro-contrast" and must be equivalent to heavy PSing again...
What results do you get if you export as 16Bit from Photomatix (HDR/tone mapping w/o compression) and just play with gradation curves in PS, something like steeper where the histogram maxima are and flatter in between, for not more than 3 maxima?
Last edited by falconeye; 03-25-2008 at 10:02 AM.